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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

That magical, special time when we
celebrate the birth of *me* on August 26th, when I’ll be the
ancient, decrepit age of twenty seven. Anyway, as usual, and I mean as I’ve
done for the past two years, I’m going to take a blogging vacation around that
time, so if anyone has something to promote or an idea to share or feels like
doing me a solid, please let me know. Also, two weeks after that is approaching my blogiversary, so I’m
going to be totally lazy and do reposts for then. Yes, I’ll be celebrating my
blog by not doing anything to it : ).

So again, if you feel like doing a
guest post for me, shoot me an email. If you don’t…don’t do anything, I guess. But be safe when you

’re celebrating my birthday. I know it’s the happiest day of the year, but don’t go overboard.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

I actually watched that stupid
movie, mostly because my mother is a mean, sadistic person who forced me. Her
excuse was “I can’t watch bad movies alone! I’d have no one to make ironic
comments to!”

She used ironic like
that, not me.

Anyway, here’s a rough play by play
of the movie, filled with the actual observations we made while watching it.

The movie begins on a boat in the
middle of, I assume, the Pacific Ocean, with a scene that has absolutely nothing
to do with the rest of the movie. An unscrupulous Asian business man is making
some sort of shady deal with an unscrupulous captain. I have no idea what it’s
about because apparently these actors haven’t heard of enunciating, but after a
few minutes they start chasing each other around on a boat during a storm
because that seems like a good idea. Unscrupulous Asian business man has
unscrupulous captain cornered when a shark flies across the screen and takes a
bite out of his leg. The storm gets worse and sharks start coming up on deck
and eating people even though sharks are fish and would probably be flopping as
they suffocated and not focused enough to swallow a guy whole, seriously that
happens. Unscrupulous captain is the last to get killed. He just kind of stands
around in the storm and, I don’t know, gets eaten piece by piece by sharks
whipping by. Or something. I don’t know. It made no sense.

Anyway, the movie really begins after that, with the
opening credits. Tara Reid is first because while she’s not the main character,
she is the most recognizable name. Then a bunch of people no one’s ever heard
of. Then…

Me: Oh, look, John Heard is in this
movie.

My mom: He is?

Me: Aw. He used to be an actor. Sad.

My mom: Sad.

Then the movie’s at a beach. It’s
California, but there are reports of hurricanes coming despite the fact that
water temperatures and wind currents make that impossible.
Anyway, there’s a guy on a jet ski hanging around, he’s like Australian or
something, and a man and a woman on surfboards. When the woman on the surfboard
is attacked, the jet ski guy does nothing. Sits there and watches, I guess. The other man on the surfboard, the actual
main character, frantically swims over to rescue her and is way too late. When
jet ski guy actually decides to go over, a shark flops up and starts gnawing on
his leg.

My mom: Sharks
don’t jump out of the water like that. They have to keep it flowing over their
gills or they die.

Me: It was your
idea to watch this movie.

Back to the
movie. There’s a lot of yelling and people running out of the water. Some guy
who is standing in water that only comes up to his calf is somehow nabbed by a giant
shark. There’s a lot of yelling, blah blah blah. The scene switches to a bar
owned by the main character, who is fawned over by his twenty year old waitress
and given a generous amount of character shilling by jet ski guy. The main character’s name happens to be “Finn” because I hate the people who made this movie.

The hurricane
that should not exist hits and wrecks the bar, and when it floods, a bunch of
sharks come spilling in and eating more people and just a bunch of other stuff
that makes no sense. The main character (I refuse to call him by name), the
waitress (her too), jet ski guy (I think his name was Paz or something equally
weird) and John Heard all run out together. The waitress clearly has a thing
against sharks and tries to shoot them every chance she gets, although I never
see anyone reload the rifle she uses. John Heard grabs a barstool and somehow
manages to impale a shark with it.

A shark explodes
after it gets shot.

Me: Apparently
sharks are explosive.

My mom: Who
knew?

The four characters
get into a car and the main character insists on picking up his family,
although from what we’ve seen of his ex-wife Tara Reid, she’s kind of a bitch.
The waitress is all shocked to hear that the main character has an ex and a
kid, as though they were best friends instead of him being her boss. As they
drive down the street, more streets flood and gigantic sharks are somehow able
to swim down them and into the sewers.
They stop in the middle of an unflooded street, but somehow the people ahead
and behind them are attacked by sharks.

Me: How is that
happening? How is that happening?
There’s no water, but then there is water, it shouldn’t be deep enough for
sharks…ow…ow.

My mom: What’s
wrong?

Me: Brain…hurts…makes
no sense…

John Heard and
the rest of his career are eaten by a shark and the rest of the characters
finally get back in the car and start moving again. They make it to Tara Reid’s
house and she and the daughter she has with the main characters are total
assholes. Tara Reid’s boyfriend comes in and flips out at the main character
for his audacity of wanting to check on his kid. Before they can be thrown out,
sharks start raining down on the house. It floods just enough so the sharks can
come in and eat the boyfriend, but good news! The car is still dry so they can
all escape. And then the house explodes with water.

Apparently, the
daughter isn’t an only child. There’s a son, too, but he’s off at flight school
in another part of Hollywood (where they live) and now they have to rescue him. They all get in the
car and start driving away when they notice a clearly empty bus in the middle
of a flooded street. The main character insists they stop to check to make sure
no one’s in there and suddenly the bus is full of kids. They park on a bridge
above the bus and rappel down and pull up the kids one by one, and then the bus
driver. Once the kids are safe, the storm starts up again and knocks over the Hollywood
sign which kills the bus driver, but none of the kids because they’re kids.
The main characters then leave and the kids leave in a single ambulance that is
in no way big enough for all of them. As the main characters are driving, more
sharks start raining down and they all scream like big babies.

Me: Oh, come on.
They’re outside the car. It’s not like the sharks can chew through the roof and
get to them.

And then I’m
stunned into silence as exactly that happens. Seriously, it was uncanny.

The car is now
ruined, but they manage to find a store that is for some reason open during a
hurricane. Then jet ski guy actually does something: he goes and steals a Humvee
from a movie memorabilia lot because looting rules apply. They rush a police
block for some reason and even though it’s a freaking Humvee and should in no
way be able to out maneuver a half dozen police cars, they escape and finally manage
to reach the flight school.

The son is there
and still alive, although seconds after the main characters arrive his teacher
is sucked into the sky. Now tornados are approaching and they have somehow
alive sharks spinning around with them. They have to do something to get rid of
the tornados because…they’ll destroy the city? I don’t know. I’m not clear on
that. California can withstand earthquakes. Anyway, to stop the tornados, they
decide to use the bombs the flight school has for some reason. The son’s six
weeks of training means he can easily fly the helicopter into the storm, and in
a blatant crime against physics, dropping bombs will dissipate the tornados. It’s
at this point the waitress and the son are left alone together and she clearly
stops crushing on her boss in order to crush on him. She also reveals why she
hates sharks so much with a story that’s basically a retelling of Quint’s story
from Jaws, but without the WWII angle. Or the good acting.

Waitress and son
go up in a helicopter to drop the bombs into the tornados and the others grab
chainsaws to use on the sharks. A bunch of people get eaten, including jet ski
guy, but the main character manages to cut a shark right in half like he’s
freaking Odin or something. Meanwhile, up in the skies, they only manage to
destroy two of the three approaching tornados. Waitress falls out of the
helicopter because she hasn’t heard of seat belts and she is immediately
swallowed whole by a shark flying around up there instead of dying. Then the
main character does some real fierce expressions (acting as hard as he can!)
and drives the Humvee, rigged with more bombs, into the storm. Now the sharks
are all falling from the sky and not splattering on the ground like they should
but eating people. They then run over to a nursing home unsubtly pointed out
earlier and save a bunch of old people. The main character pours gasoline in a
pool and lights it on fire. Then it explodes.

Me: Come on! That’s
not how chemistry works!

One final shark
comes swooping down even though it should be dead from being out of the water
and he runs at it with a chainsaw. Then it swallows him whole. And dies. And he
cuts his way out of it. Then he reaches back in and pulls out waitress.

My mom: It’s the same shark?

Me: And she’s
alive, so being swallowed by the shark didn’t kill her.

My mom: Look how
big it is. And they were both in there, swallowed whole. The shark must be
hollow inside.

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Unit is a clear example of the
evolution of a word from one thing to something completely different. But it
also has the rarity of almost making sense. See, when it showed up in the mid sixteenth century,
it only meant a number of things regarded as an undivided group, i.e. a herd of
sheep would be a unit, but the individual animals would not be. From there it
evolved to a single part of a greater whole in the seventeenth century—so at
that time, a member of the herd would
be a unit—and then finally, it became a standard of measure in the eighteenth
century. So it went from a whole, to a part, to a quantity of measure. Okay, I
take back the part about it making sense.

There’s also a totally awesome digression
I can (and will) go into: see, union is obviously related to unit, right? Well, it just so happens that in Late Latin it’s unionem, which is also a way to
say, and I quote, “a single pearl or onion”. There are layers to an onion, but the
whole is a unit, as it were, so unionem became a colloquialism for
“a type of onion”. And that was kept in Old French, Anglo-French, and in
English to the point where it became the official version of the word in both
English and French (oignion).

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

While looking through my blog roll, I
read a post that said dystopian, as a genre, is dead. There was some other stuff, too, but that’s obviously the part that concerns me as a writer of post-apocalyptic with shades of dystopian.

I have to admit, there
has been an overabundance of works taking place in bright and shining worlds
that achieve piece by exerting total control over the people. And of course
there’s a rebellion, and an evil president, and a girl who accepts everything
until she meets a certain boy (or sometimes vice versa).

These are just generalities. The
actual books are varied and layered. And truly, you can’t go to a bookstore
without tripping over a stack of dystopians. I just never thought this was a
bad thing : P. But it does mean it’s a lot harder to stand out these days.

Is it the end? Far from it. A few
years ago, it was contemporary YA I head that was dead, and only the freshest, best
written were published. Then before that, it was Urban Fantasy that was gone,
saturated with TWILIGHT knockoffs and girls with magic powers (or dating boys
with magic powers). Both of these genres are still alive and kicking, so I’m
thinking dystopian isn’t so much dead as it is in a recession. It’s still going
to be hard to get noticed, but if you work hard, edit hard, and never give up,
you still have as much a chance of getting published as anyone.

---Speaking of which: “Texas teacher accused of duct taping student to chair”… a year after another teacher was accused of ordering kindergartners to hit a child. I’m not a mother. I have no desire to be one. Honestly, I’m not big on kids in general. But come on. How do people not get that you can’t treat children like that?!

---Yes, an interrobang is absolutely necessary.

---Actual quote from the teacher-duct tape article: “‘We are talking about human beings and they do make mistakes. Having said that that behavior is not excusable.’”

---There is “mistake”. Then there is “child abuse”. There’s a big difference.

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Kind, both a word for being nice and
a word for type or ilk. Is there a reason for this disparity? What a foolish
question. Of course there’s not.

Both kinds of kind come from an Old English word, nice kind from gecynd and type kind from the radically
different gecynde. The words are obviously related—gecynd means type or nature and gecynde means natural
or native. The gec part of the word disappeared sometime around the thirteenth
century, so cynd (with a hard c) morphed into kind. The word kin is alsorelated,
coming from the Old English cynn,
family.

You can look further back into kind.
Before it was gecynd, there was the Proto Germanic gakundjaz, family or race. That word comes
from gecynde’s forbearer, gakundiz,
native or natural. Gakundiz is a variation of yet another Proto German word, kunjam. It turns out that the ga- is a
prefix that indicates the word is applied to a group. Traces of the word can
still be found in other Germanic languages; the Dutch kunne (sex, as in gender) is descended from kind, as is the
German word for children, kind (like kindergarten). Kunjam is also related to
the Proto Indo European word gene, the word that gives us genus.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

I was browsing around the
blogosphere (holy crap, Word says blogosphere is a word) when I saw someone
talking about the implausibility of something. It probably had to do with The Walking Dead. I mean, it usually
does. Anyway, it got me thinking: how much must belief be suspended before
something becomes unlikeable?

Obviously the threshold is different
for different people, and sometimes one part of a movie/book/show can be
enjoyed while the other isn’t, which is the only reasonable explanation for how
the above mentioned The Walking Dead
still exists. For example, sometimes in that show you see cool, gory zombies.
But then the characters start talking and I get all screamy at the television.

It also depends on how well done
something is. For example, I went to see the latest Die Hard movie (don’t ask
me the title, I don’t remember) and as breathtaking as the twenty-minute car
chase was, I regret the money spent on that turd bomb. Nothing that happened
made sense. [WARNING: Spoilers ahoy. But only if you actually are worried about
the plot of that Die Hard movie and really. Really. Are you? Didn’t think so] First
of all, if you’re trying to break someone out of prison it might seem like a
good idea to get arrested yourself by murdering someone, but, hello? You freaking murdered someone. It’s the
kind of thing that causes a butt load of bad feelings between countries with
already strained relations. So it’s kind of a stupid idea. There’s no way they’d
let a CIA operative get a free pass for that. And the saddest part? That’s only
one example of why that movie is a betrayal to American storytelling.

But while Die Hard 5 had nothing to
redeem its leaps of common sense, several movies with equally unlikely
situations are still good. The Hunger
Games had a few iffy spots, but I still liked it—although there are plenty
of people who didn’t. Again, The Walking
Dead is another good example of something I can’t discern the appeal that
gives it such a powerful following.

So there are good things, there are
bad things, and there are things that some people like and some people hate.
Ever been to Rotten Tomatoes? It’s basically that,
but you can see how other people voted. They really need one of those for
books.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

It’s going to be a rant this week. I
gave you something fun last week, so now you must listen to…read my complaints. Although honestly, I
think this is something that should
be complained about.

In general, people don’t play nice
on the internet—see GIFT or the
comment section on any YouTube video for further reference. What I’ve never
understood is why, why people act
like bullying jerks just because they can get away with it. I don’t get why
treating someone like total shit is in anyway beneficial.

For example, several months ago I
saw a tweet that said something like “If you unfollow me because of what I say,
I will block AND report you!” First, let’s get it out of the way: block and report on Twitter doesn't automatically result in ANYTHING. If you get a Direct Message that says
“LOL look at this picture of you I found online” or accidentally mention the
word computer and get fifty million replies to buy one, you can click on the
options button and select “Block and report for spam” and it keeps the person
from tweeting at you again. It does not necessarily suspend them, although having a report can cause sometimes non-spammers to be suspended. Now, f you are being harassed, you can fill out a form to report people,
but that’s not what this person threatened to do (not like that would have been right, either).

This person used the
block-and-report as a threat. Keep following me (and listening to my unpleasant
rants) or I’ll get you in trouble. I had to deal with this crap in middle
school. It was why I was happy to get out of there. People told me that things
were supposed to get better once I was out of school. Well, they lied.

These days, the internet is freaking
middle school, and we’re all students trying to psychologically destroy each
other. The teachers are the social networking sites, the YouTubes, the
Twitters, the Facebooks, who have these rules and don’t really enforce them
because they don’t really care, but might if someone screams loud enough—and
that’s usually the bullies. Follow me or I’ll report you.

What did I do about that Tweeter?
Blocked her, naturally. One benefit of being bullied for six solid years in school is
that I have no interest in giving in. If you act vicious and hateful online
(not that any of you would, thankfully), I will stop following you. Freedom of speech
doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

It’s definitely been too long since
I’ve done this! Really, I’m way too excited about it : ).

O is a circle, such a basic symbol
that it also represents the mathematical nothing. If you look at the alphabet gif, our
O is the same in Etruscan, the
language of the people who passed on the symbols (although not the language) to the Roman Empire, which would one day spread it to England and make its way
through the years to us. That symbol came from the Greek omicron, where it’s the fantastical symbol…O. And lowercase o. Shocking,
right? But interesting side note: omega (Ωω) is also an O in Greek (mega and
micron, big and small). It used to specify the long o vowel while omicron was
the short, but these days they’re mostly the same.

Back to business. The Greeks came up
with their alphabet by copying that of thePhoenicians, who used the symbol O, but not as a vowel. See,
the Phoenician language is what’s known as an abjad, or consonant alphabet,
meaning they had no symbols for vowels—making it the “oh” sound was the Greeks
idea. The Phoenician O, or Ayin, did not symbolize a sound at all. Way backwith the letter A I mentioned that the Greeks made a letter from the symbol for
a glottal stop (basically it’s like not saying a hard consonant, like t, before another consonant (“pet dog” becomes “peh dog”)). Anyway, the Greeks did the same thing with O,
this time taking a symbol for a voiced pharyngeal fricative. I can’t really
explain what that is, but they have an audio example on the Wikipedia page for it. It’s something
like “aaah”.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Remakes are a funny thing. You take
a movie/television show that’s already been made and attempt to update it and
recapture that old magic. Occasionally, it even works.

You see it often in movies and
television (Hollywood prefers things that come with built-in audiences), but
not as much with books. However, we do have a good one with the updates of the
classic fairytales Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood that take the form of CINDER and SCARLET by Marissa Meyer. Although the original stories aren’t novels by a long shot,
the result is in the same spirit of the greatest remakes: fresh, its own
creature, full of echoes of the original.

Another “remade” book is WICKED,
done by Gregory Maguire to show the other side of the Wizard of Oz by L. Frank
Baum (he’s also got MIRROR, MIRROR, a retelling of Snow white). Yes, fairy tales do seem to be popular stories to
remake.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES by
Seth Grahme-Smith is a good book, but I’m not sure it qualifies as a true
remake. It’s a parody, a rewrite with a specific idea in mind to change the
original, rather than a reworking of the original material. There’s also the
I-can’t-decide-if-they-really-suck-or-are-actually-okay Frankenstein “sequels”
by Dean Koontz. They
aren’t true remakes since they take place after the original book is supposed
to, but a great deal of the original story was changed to fit what he wanted. However,
it doesn’t have much spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel. I don’t think they count.
It doesn’t help that I’m leaning towards “they suck” right now.

I think the success of CINDER and
WICKED means book remakes will only become more popular. Whether they’ll be
good, though, remains to be seen.

Do you guys know of any book
remakes? What do you think of them, yay or nay?

Is, the most common word for those
of us who write in present tense, comes from the Old English is and can be traced to the Proto Indo European
es, to be. This word is still apart
of many languages, from the German ist
to the French est to the Latin esse. It can also be found in English words
like essence.
So originally, it was another word for be, or bheue, and now they’re both the
same word.

Was comes from the Old English wesan, waes, and waeron (the origin word for the plural
were),
which are actually forms of the word wesan,
to remain. Wesan comes from the Proto Germanic wesanan and the Proto Indo European wes, remain or dwell. Although it used to be its own word, sometime
between Proto Germanic and Old English it turned into the past tense of be.

Am comes from the Old English eom, to be or remain,
and Proto Indo European esmi. Back in
Old English, it only appeared in the present tense and until the thirteenth
century meant something like “come to be” while existence was expressed with
wes up there. There’s also are, which was earun/aron
in Old English and probably came from the Proto Germanic ar,
a possible variant of es. I guess
people started combining the various definitions of be until they found forms
that worked.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

1. Finish collecting and giving
critiques. This should be easy. I love beta reading.

Still in
the middle of this, although there isn’t much I can do to get critiques done
faster. I forget sometimes that most people don’t read 10K a day.

2. Start posting more at the
Spamfiles. I think having more posts will attract more readers. Could it be
that other people don’t find spam as amusing as I do?

Got this
one done. I’m still disappointed that I don’t have more followers, though.

3. Add 20K more words to my rewrite.
Usually first draft writing is easy for me, but I’ve been feeling a little bit
of the writer’s block lately. I hope I can do it.

Kind of
a failure. Because it’s a rewrite, there are still some things from the old
version that I can use, so I’ve been working on that. But I could have done
more if I hadn’t gotten distracted by a shiny new project. Darn your shininess!

Not as successful maybe, but not
bad. I should’ve done more with number 3. On the other hand, I got a bunch of
stuff done that wasn’t on my list, like aforementioned new project (something
like twenty K there, so pretty good), and switching over to the new blog. I’d
give my final grade as a B. An actual B, too, not a scaled B. Not bad.

Okay, now for July (I can’t believe
the year is half over already!)

July Goals

1. Finish going over suggestions
from previous readers for COLLAPSE. Maybe try to find more critique partners. I’ve
got some good feedback, but I don’t know if four is enough (especially when I don’t
have them all back yet).

2. Be more present in social media.
Mostly I want to leave more comments, respond to every one I receive, and
return the favor.

3. Add 20K more to New Project and finish combining the new and the old
versions.

I wonder if it’s too ambitious or
not ambitious enough.

Anyway, what are your plans for
July, for writing or otherwise? Anyone doing anything fun?